Dr. Ben S. Bernanke is economist at the Brookings Institution and served two terms as chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from 2006 to 2014. He also served as chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee, the System’s principal monetary policymaking body.

Before his appointment as chairman of the Fed, Bernanke was chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, from June 2005 to January 2006, and he served the Federal Reserve System in several roles—as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from 2002 to 2005; as a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Banks of Philadelphia (1987-89), Boston (1989-90) and New York (1990-91, 1994-96) and as a member of the Academic Advisory Panel at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (1990-2002).

From 1994 to 1996, Bernanke was the Class of 1926 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He was the Howard Harrison and Gabrielle Snyder Beck Professor of Economics and Public Affairs and chair of the Economics Department at the university from 1996 to 2002. Bernanke had been a professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton since 1985. He served for seven years as chairman of the Princeton Economic Department.

Before arriving at Princeton, Bernanke was an associate professor of Economics (1983-85) and an assistant professor of Economics (1979-83) at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. His teaching career also included serving as a visiting professor of Economics at New York University (1993) and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1989-90).

Bernanke has published many articles on a wide variety of economic issues, including monetary policy and macroeconomics, and he is the author of several scholarly books and two textbooks. He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Sloan Fellowship, and he is a fellow of the Econometric Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He served as the director of the Monetary Economics Program of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and as a member of the NBER’s Business Cycle Dating Committee. In July 2001, he was appointed editor of the American Economic Review. Bernanke’s work with civic and professional groups includes having served two terms as a member of the Montgomery Township (N.J.) Board of Education.

Bernanke was born in Augusta, Georgia, and grew up in Dillon, South Carolina. He received a B.A. in economics in 1975 from Harvard University (summa cum laude) and a Ph.D. in economics in 1979 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is married and has two children.